Sunday, December 30, 2012

My most trusted associate prepared these chestnuts last night. It isn't often that somebody else's work shows up in this space, but on a holiday weekend such as this an exception feels about right. Besides, there are still plenty of fresh chestnuts to be had in the stores and so now is the time you'll want to get to work on these.

Preheat oven to 425°. Place a large sheet of foil on a rimmed baking sheet. Place chestnuts, flat side down, on a work surface. Using a utility knife or a sharp paring knife, carefully cut through the shell on the rounded side of each chestnut to score an X. Soak in a bowl of hot water for 1 minute (this helps them steam while roasting).
Drain chestnuts and pat dry; place in a medium bowl. Add rosemary, butter, 2 teaspoons salt, and nutmeg. Season with pepper and toss to thoroughly coat. Arrange chestnuts in a single layer in center of foil (a few might overlap) and gather up edges of foil around chestnuts, leaving a large opening on top.
Roast until the peel begins to curl up and chestnuts are cooked through, 30-45 minutes, depending on size and age of nuts.
Transfer chestnuts to a platter, using a spatula to scrape in any butter and spices with them, and toss to coat. Season with more salt, if desired. Serve hot or warm.

Preheat oven to 300 degrees F
In a food processor, crumble the pistachio paste, then add the sugars and flour and mix until fine
Add the egg whites and mix until dough forms
Scoop out small amounts of the dough (wet hands help and so I keep a bowl filled with water on hand), then press three or four pistachios on top
Place on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper and bake for 15 minutes
Rotate the sheet and bake another 10 minutes
Allow to cool, give a light dusting of confectioners sugar and serve

Saturday, December 15, 2012

(Note to those seeking quick access to this week's recipe: Scroll down to the next photo, as a rather tense family drama is about to unfold.)

See, I recently promised a loyal reader named Melissa that I would make struffoli for the holidays. Basically crisp fried dough balls cooked in honey, struffoli is a Neopolitan specialty around Christmas, and so Melissa's request was not at all unexpected. What she didn't know, however, is that I had never made struffoli before in my life, and so I did the only thing that seemed reasonable.

"Hey Anna," I barked into the phone, "I want to make struffoli."

"Good," my aunt said. "Josephine's coming this weekend. Come and help if you want."

It only took a minute to jot down Anna's instructions. Then the trouble started.

"Does Aunt Laura use this recipe too?" I asked innocently enough.

"No, she uses milk in hers," Anna said, brusquely, I thought. "Why, you want her recipe? Her struffoli are no good."

"I was just asking. Why, what's wrong with Laura's struffoli?"

"I just told you, she uses milk. You're not supposed to use milk."

"So, what, it ruins the texture? The taste? What exactly?"

"How should I know? I never had your aunt's struffoli."

I should mention that Anna and Laura are in no way estranged. In fact, they're really quite close as sisters-in-law go. They live about a quarter mile apart and see each other regularly.

"You've known each other for 70 years and you never had her struffoli? How is that even possible?"

"What do you want from me?"

"And if you never tried Laura's, how do you know they're not good?"

"There's eggplant in the oven," Anna told me. "I have to go."

(Note to those of you who are still with me: There is ample time to scroll down to the photos and recipe, you know. I'll understand.)

A not-so-attractive trait that I possess is tenacity. And so, yes, Laura's was a struffoli recipe that I now had to have. Due to a bad bit of luck on the health front, speaking to my aunt by phone wasn't possible, and so I texted my swell cousin Susie, her daughter-in-law, who was still living in Laura's apartment due to being displaced by Hurricane Sandy back in October: "Ask Laura for her struffoli recipe and email it to me when you get a chance. Also ask her if she's ever had Anna's struffoli. If she has, ask her if she liked them."

A few days later Susie sent me the recipe but nothing else.

"Didn't you ask her about Anna?" I responded.

"Yes, I did. Not sure if you can use it, though."

"Why's that?"

"Because she didn't actually say anything," Susie wrote. "All she did was make a face!"

If you are unfamiliar with the language shared by many families such as mine, allow me to translate. Laura's making a face could only mean one thing: she doesn't like Anna's struffoli any more than Anna likes hers. Whether she's ever tried them or not.

Which brings us to why loving your family as much as I do can be a real problem. By asking both Anna and Laura for their recipes I now had to decide which one of them to actually use. Which meant insulting one of the very dearest women I have ever known.

After two whole days of torturing myself over this decision, and a disastrous attempt at creating an original recipe that made use of chickpea flour (don't ask!), I readied to inform Melissa that I would not be making struffoli this Christmas after all.

My friend Fred, I should mention, shares a home with an expert struffoli maker. Each year this person hosts something called "Struffoli Saturday," a work event where multiple friends and loved ones get down to the task of producing a hell of a lot of struffoli for their holidays. This individual's recipe, it turns out, is as closely guarded as her identity. But something very close, Fred assured me, was published in a magazine some time ago. That is the recipe my friend connected me with in order to avoid insulting one of my dear aunts. And that, with only a couple of minor alterations, is the recipe that I have used here.

This recipe (reprinted in full below) calls for a fairly wet dough. First mix the ingredients in a bowl and then roll the dough out onto a floured surface and kneed for a bit.

Once the dough is workable cut it into six pieces and then roll out each piece like so.

Cut into half-inch pieces and lightly roll each one into a ball before deep frying.

It doesn't take very long to fry struffoli. Depending on the temperature of the oil it can take anywhere from one to three minutes. Just keep an eye on them. These are about as light in color as you'll want; they can stay in the oil longer and get a bit darker if you prefer.

Removing the struffoli to paper towels gets rid of at least some of the oil. At this stage you can either finish the whole job, part of the job, or just store the struffoli until you're ready to make them. I prepared the whole batch and so this works out according to the full recipe's instructions.

Well, sort of. For starters, I used at least twice the amount of candied fruit as called for. (This gets diced up finely, by the way, but the fruit are so pretty I wanted to show them in the pre-cut stage.)

In a pan under low- to medium heat warm honey and the zest of one orange.

Then add the struffoli and mix thoroughly. I also added some of the candied fruit at this stage, but the recipe doesn't call for that.

Saturday, December 8, 2012

Aside from the air, the water and a good sfogliatelle, the two things that I most require to function in this world are bread and pasta.

Big surprise, then, that a bowl of spaghetti and bread crumbs is a favorite around here.

If your people trace back to southern Italy, Calabria especially, this might be a traditional dish on Christmas Eve. It isn't part of my family's holiday tradition; Aunt Rita usually goes with a hazelnut sauce over angel hair. And so I make this spaghetti with bread crumbs pretty much whenever I please.

Use any plain bread crumbs that you like, of course, but you'll never convince me that homemade isn't best. The bread crumbs that I keep around the house come from leftover crusty loaves made by talented bakers right here in town. This is about a cup's worth of crumbs, which is enough for at least a pound of pasta, probably more.

In a hot pan toast the bread crumbs. You don't need to coat the pan first, but make sure to stir the crumbs frequently and make sure that they don't burn. This should only take a few minutes at medium heat, so do not—I repeat, DO NOT—leave the bread crumbs unattended—say, while texting your pals a link to that preposterous YouTube video of Dylan singing "It Must Be Santa." I know. I've been harassing people with that one for a couple holiday cycles now myself. Just remember why we're here, okay. The crumbs have got to come first.

This is where individual taste comes into play, and so feel free to adjust the ingredients however you like. Translation: you people who refuse to use anchovy in your cooking can just forget that they're here and stick with a straight-up aglio e olio.

Where was I? Right. I'm not shy about using extra virgin olive oil. It's the basis of this dish and so I'm not about to measure it out in tablespoons; I pour out what I pour out, that's all. The other ingredients are garlic (there's gotta be four good-size cloves here at least), hot pepper to taste, and of course plenty of anchovy fillets. (Deal with it.)

The only other ingredients are the pasta and the all-important (well-salted) water that it's boiled in, so don't throw all of the pasta water down the drain. I use tongs to transfer the cooked spaghetti from the water and into the pan, then ladle in as much water as needed to properly incorporate the ingredients. This stage should be done quickly and at very high heat.

What we've got here is less than a half pound of spaghetti, by the way. I'll incorporate two or three good pinches of bread crumbs while the pasta is in the pan, then sprinkle about as much over the top after it's plated.

This is some seriously good peasant food we've got here, friends. I'll take it over air and water any day.

Saturday, December 1, 2012

Then my friend Tom turned me around. Eight or ten holiday seasons ago he showed up at my place with a specimen he had baked an entire year earlier. This fruit cake was wrapped so tightly, and in so many layers of different materials, that it took us several minutes just to unwrap and have a look at the thing.

What I remember most is the smell. Tom's was one boozy baked good, all right. Not only was there bourbon in the recipe he'd used, but every few weeks the guy would strip the cake down to its cheesecloth skivvies, drizzle more whiskey over it, rewrap and then return the cake to its assigned resting place inside the fridge. That's a lot of drizzling that went on over the year.

Tom's fruit cake was like none I had ever tasted. The thing weighed a ton, yeah, but it was also incredibly moist and satisfying. Best of all, the flavors were spectacular, owing much to my friend's prominent use of figs and prunes and nuts and other good things he'd taken from the cupboard and tossed in.

It's gotten so that Tom really cannot afford to show his mug around here during the holidays without a fruit cake stuffed into his backpack. Not if he wants a place to sleep, he can't.

This year his fruit cake may have company, because a couple weeks back I decided to get hold of Tom's recipe and give it a try myself. The foundation comes from a recipe provided by King Arthur Flour, which I've reprinted in full below. However, like my friend, I messed with it some.

The fruit, raisins and nuts get combined with 4 cups of all-purpose flour, and then you add to that a mixture of butter, sugar, eggs and brandy or rum (I went with Jack Daniel's).

Stir it all together so that the ingredients are well combined (at this point I decided to add a little more Jack, though I'm not sure why).

Then get yourself some buttered-and-floured cake pans and fill them with the mix. (Note: the recipe claims to make one 10-inch cake, but that's not even close to being true. The blue pan at the top is a deep 10-incher, and I got another couple of smaller cakes out of the batch.)

Once the cakes are out of the oven let them cool for 15 minutes. Then drizzle some more liquor on top and allow them to cool thoroughly.

I decided to take my friend's lead and age these cakes, at least for a few months. Wrap them in cheesecloth, then moisten the cloth with whatever liquor you like (I stuck with the Jack Daniel's all the way). Add a layer of plastic wrap, then aluminum foil, and then toss into a Ziploc-type bag. Store in the fridge and occasionally take the cakes out and pour a little liquor over the cheesecloth, just to keep things nice and moist.

Tom is promising to have a two-year-old fruit cake in his backpack when he arrives for his annual weeklong visit in a few weeks. By that time my cakes will be around six weeks old, and so maybe we'll break into one of them and do a side-by-side comparison.

There are worse experiments to participate in, you know.

King Arthur's Light Old Fashioned Fruit Cake Recipe
From "The Baking Sheet Newsletter"

Preheat your oven to a 275°F. Grease and flour a 10-inch tube pan, two 9 x 5-inch bread pans, four 1-pound coffee cans (the wide, short kind) or 8 small bread pans. (They're insane. I got three cakes out of this recipe; Tom says he usually does too.)

In a very large mixing bowl, mix together the flour, salt, and spices. Add the nuts and fruit, mixing until they are well coated.

In a second bowl, cream the butter and sugar until they are light and fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating the mixture thoroughly after each addition. Stir in the brandy or rum.

Stir the wet ingredients into the dry and mix only until they are well combined. Fill whichever pan you use 2/3 full and bake for about 1 1/2 to 2 hours, depending on the size of your pans. (My two smaller cakes took an hour to cook; the larger one, an hour and forty minutes.)

After you remove the cakes from the oven, let them cool in their pans for 15 minutes. After this rest, remove the cake from its pan and immediately sprinkle brandy or rum over them; then let them cool completely. Wrap in plastic wrap and then aluminum foil. Store in a cool place to let the flavors mellow and mature. You can sprinkle a few drops of brandy or rum over them every few days during the storage period if you wish. The alcohol evaporates and leaves only flavor.

These fruit cakes will last for months if you can keep them that long. They taste so good, they are hard to give away, but they do make wonderful gifts.

To serve, cut the cake in very thin slices. It is very rich and will go a long way.

Saturday, November 24, 2012

Show of hands. How many of you have ever awoken on a brilliant Sunday morning in the deep of Autumn, obsessed not with love or leisure but with oxtails?

Figures.

This urge of mine arose completely out of the blue, mind you. I had gone to bed harboring no plans whatever of cooking oxtails the next day. The subject had not come up in conversation, and there wasn't a single oxtail in the freezer crying out to be had at.

Thing is, I listen to the voices inside my head. Always. By 9 a.m. I had spoken to every butcher within 30 miles who was at work on Sunday and well before noontime the oxtails and I were back at the house, safe and sound.

I know. I worry about me too sometimes.

An oxtail ragú recipe in Mario Batali's "The Babbo Cookbook" is pretty simple and so I went with that. This is about 5 pounds of oxtails, liberally seasoned with kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper.

Dredge the oxtails in all-purpose flour.

In a Dutch oven sear the meat on both sides in very hot olive oil until golden brown. This will need to be done in a couple of batches, as five pounds won't fit all at once, not even in my most gigantic (13-quart) Le Creuset.

Remove the meat and set aside. Add two sliced onions and saute until softened but not browned.

Add 4 cups of red wine (I used an inexpensive aglianico), one cup of a simple tomato sauce, 2 cups chicken stock, and fresh thyme. Let this come to a boil, then add the meat, cover and place in an oven preheated to 375 F. (Note on the tomato sauce: I always have some around. If you don't, and aren't in the mood to make some, I'd suggest adding a couple garlic cloves, some herbs and one or two diced carrots when sauteing the onions and then adding canned crushed tomatoes at this stage. I'm sure that'll work out just fine.)

In about 90 minutes check and see if the meat is nicely softened. If it isn't just let it cook a little longer. This batch was done in 2 hours, at which point I removed the oxtails from the sauce, allowed them to cool, then picked the meat off the bones.

All that's left to do now is add the meat back to the sauce and reheat.

That first night I served the ragú over potato gnocchi, which you already saw above. But a couple days later I went with a fresh cavatelli.

The ragú was even better after a couple days. But these things usually are, which is why I'll normally cook something like this at least a day in advance.

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
Trim the excess fat from the oxtails and season liberally with salt and pepper.
In a 6- to 8-quart, heavy bottomed casserole or Dutch oven, heat the olive oil over high heat until it is just smoking. Quickly dredge the oxtails in flour and sear them on all sides until browned, turning with long-handled tongs. Remove the browned oxtail to a plate and set aside.
Add the onions to the same pan and cook them until slightly browned. Add the wine, stock, tomato sauce and thyme, and bring the mixture to a boil. Return the oxtails to the pot, submerging them in the liquid, and return the pot to a boil. Cover and cook in the oven for 1 to 1 1/2 hours, or until the meat is falling off the bone.
Remove the pan from the oven and carefully remove the oxtails with long-handled tongs. When they are cool enough to handle, remove the meat from the bones and shred into small pieces with a fork. Discard the bones.
With a small ladle, skim the fat from the surface of the sauce. Return the shredded meat to the pot. Place over medium high heat, bring to a boil, then reduce to simmer and allow the sauce to reduce to a very thick ragú. Season with salt and pepper.
Serve over the pasta of your choice, topped with grated Pecorino.

Friday, November 23, 2012

The picture doesn't exactly capture the moment, but what a moment it was.

This is my first plate from yesterday's Thanksgiving feast, held about a mile from here, at the home of my friends Scott and Giovani. There are tasty brussels sprouts, whole roasted carrots, delicious oyster stuffing, super-smooth mashed potatoes, and a very well turned out bit of fresh turkey.

The moment is about the manicotti, though. Because they were a closely guarded secret among all of the guests who attended the elegant holiday bash.

All of them except for me.

Long story short, my friends had read the piece that I had written about my mother's Thanksgiving manicotti. And so to honor her — a woman who they had never met, by the way — they decided to add an extra multi-step item to an already labor-intense menu.

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Should you wish to take a page from the Meatballs' Thanksgiving tradition, then you had best be prepared to add a pasta course to the festivities.

And not just any pasta course.

My mother (she's the one at the far left, swigging what appears to be a pink bubbly) always made manicotti on Thanksgiving. Those are probably hers on the far right, below the turkey and a fork's lift away from her eldest brother Joe. Uncle Joe is sitting next to his father, my grandfather, John.

There are a lot of Johns in my family. One is sitting next to my grandfather, come to think of it. I wasn't yet born on this Thanksgiving Day, but had I been there might be three Johns at the table, not two. If you count middle names, that is. And were I seated with this particular group.

See, there are likely two or three other tables lined up that aren't visible here, each crowded with as many people. Tight quarters considering that the apartments my grandfather's six children lived in back then, with their own growing families, were on the small side. I can't even tell whose apartment this holiday is taking place in because the six flats in our family's side-by-side tenement houses all looked the same.

Anyhow, you didn't come here looking for a history lesson. And so I'll wish you all a very, very happy holiday and leave it at that.

And if you are inclined to make with the manicotti, here's the recipe that I learned from watching mom. It's from a post that I did here early this year, but repeating it now seemed appropriate.

My family prefers crepes over pasta shells. The thinner and lighter the crepe the better the manicotti, so use a blender for the mix, and keep adding milk if it thickens as you're working. The full recipe is below.

A super hot omelette pan doused in butter is the way to a great crepe. I keep a bowl of melted butter next to the stovetop and apply it with a bristle brush before pouring the crepe mix into the pan.

To make thin crepes you must barely cover the surface of the pan with the mixture. Once the crepe is set and drying flip it over with a spatula. If your pan is properly heated this won't take very long at all.

Here's what the cooked side should look like. After flipping the crepe it only takes maybe 30 seconds more to finish the other side.

This is a pretty traditional filling, made with ricotta and fresh mozzarella.

A simple fold from one side and then the other does the trick.

Lay a light dose of tomato sauce in a baking pan, line the manicotti side by side, then add some more sauce on top. Cover in aluminum foil and throw into the oven, preheated to about 375 degrees F. Remove the foil after around 25 minutes and continue baking.

After another 15 or 20 minutes the manicotti should be done.

This being Thanksgiving, one or two of these babies apiece should do the trick.

Happy Thanksgiving everybody!

Manicotti

Recipe

Makes about 24

For the crepe

2 cups flour

4 extra large eggs

2 1/4 cups milk (more as needed)

Pinch of salt

Mix together in a blender until fully incorporated.

For the filling

2 lbs ricotta

1 lb fresh mozzarella

1 extra large egg

1/3 cup grated Romano cheese

Pinch of nutmeg

Salt and pepper to taste

In a large bowl add the ricotta. With a wide-cut grater grate the mozzarella over the ricotta. Add all the other ingredients and mix thoroughly.